Le Manoir de Mortvielle or Mortville Manor is another of those IIGS unreleased
or unfinished game surprises.

The game was originally created by Lankhor, a
name a new to me. According to the About dialog, the IIGS version is brought
to us by Second Sight Software (SSS) which was another guise of the FTA. The
game is entirely in French, except for the About dialog! As an interesting
note, you'll notice that 'About the Authors' is dimmed. To see a silly picture
(and learn no more about the authors) and access the menu, hold down the option
key.

I've since been told that this
was simply another the FTA's experiments in producing games. My only criticism
of the FTA is that they rarely finished any of their experiments, including
Mortville Manor but also Space Harrier, Blue Helmet and Oil Landers.

The game
is entirely driven by pull down menus; no text parser to enter commands. Regardless
of my lack of knowledge in French, I tried every menu option to which nothing
much happened under the 'Act' or 'Self' menus, but 'Inv' is the player's inventory
and 'Dep' moves you to and from locations. I'm guessing you have to solve a
mystery of sorts: probably a murder, or something equally unpleasant.

The graphics
range from excellent to average between different locations. Sound is nice,
what there is of it. The game loads nice and quickly from ProDOS 8, but I guess
we would expect nothing less from Second Sight Software/FTA. There you have
it. Another reason to start practicing your French language skills!